[X] My Assistant

[Mark6]

Today I heard this on NPR: Exploring a moon by boat

The mission could launch around 2016 and be sailing on Titan around 2022 — if this team gets through a highly competitive selection process to get funding from NASA. Stofan and her colleagues are busy working up their proposal for when NASA begins to accept ideas for future Discovery-class missions.

Quick Google search on Dr. Stofan's name found this: What Next for Titan?

Ellen Stofan has a Discovery-class Titan lake lander proposal. I've not seen the presentation, but a friend who has tells me that it is less capable than the ESA lake lander proposed for TSSM. (This would make sense – ESA had a budget of ~$1B for just the lake lander and balloon. Stofan has just $450M and has to fit a carrier craft and launch vehicle into that budget.) The 2007 report did not look at lake landers. I know of Stofan by reputation, and she's highly competent. However, fitting in a carrier, lander (with entry shell), and launch vehicle within a Discovery mission budget seems ambitious. Perhaps this could be done with a New Frontiers budget ($650M with the launch vehicle provided by NASA outside this budget), although the 2007 budget suggested that a budget twice this amount would be needed just for an atmopheric probe.

Aside from above quote's understandable skepticism of the Discovery-class price tag, where would plutonium for this mission come from? I thought it is all already allocated?

[rlorenz]

Good to see this topic has stimulated a lot of discussion.

Since Discovery is a competed mission, I will not be saying very much (clearly, I am involved!), but
I think all the concerns raised so far at least are being addressed.

Some remarks on the general question of lakes vs other targets. The landing system is rather simpler
- Apollo didnt do a water landing just for the heck of it, it is simply much easier. More particularly
the chemical sampling for the MS is easier too.

You could probably do a dune lander (and in the 2007 Flagship study, I advocated exactly that,
because the budget permitted inclusion of sampling arms a la Phoenix and a lot of instrumentation)
As the existence of this thread implies, the Disco cap is a challenging one, although much less so
with the ASRGs provided, so the straightforward sampling of a liquid has appeal cost-wise.

Another point is that as the seasons change, the northern lakes will go into winter darkness for a
decade (more particularly, direct-to-earth comm will become impossible) so if any stand-alone
mission to the lakes is to fly, it'll be at this Disco opportunity (launch circa 2016).

Hopefully there will still be a Titan Flagship mission (orbiter + balloon, at least) in my lifetime.

[Webscientist]

I'm in favour of a lander "boat/submarine" to be parachuted along the shoreline of Kraken Mare in the high northern latitudes. And it might not be the boring place that some of us are imagining.
The question of exobiology in that environment can't be ruled out. We have an exotic solvent, probably a mixture of methane and ethane and of course carbon molecules and an apparently dynamic weather system (giant ethane cloud engulfing the north polar region).
Maybe that the imager of the probe will take emerging animals from the sea or even birds. Birds in such an environment might not have too many difficulties to fly (dense air, weak gravity) as Ralph Lorenz had pointed out in "Lifting Titan's Veil".

I hope, of course, that Kraken Mare won't have dried out during the summer season of the northern hemisphere. If the lakes are too volatile, I admit, however that the exobiology question loses some credibility.